A top university in the United Kingdom has reportedly slapped a content warning on the Bible, saying it contains “graphic bodily injury and sexual violence,” including the Crucifixion.
Students studying English literature at the University of Sheffield in Sheffield, England, are given guidance that alerts them about the Gospels, especially, according to details of the guidance reported by The Mail on Sunday.
The University of Sheffield, which was recently ranked one of the top universities in the U.K. by The Guardian University Guide 2026, emphasized to The Christian Post that the content note is not intended to treat the Bible differently than other texts or to prevent discussion on it.
“A content note is a standard academic tool used to signpost when sensitive or graphic content will be discussed. Its purpose is to ensure subjects can be highlighted and discussed openly and critically, while preparing students who might find such details difficult,” a spokesperson for the school told CP.
“Even for well-known texts, academic study requires a level of detail that can often reveal more intense or challenging material than students’ everyday knowledge of the story suggests.”
Some advocates, however, believe the school’s guidance is foolish.
“Applying trigger warnings to salvation narratives that have shaped our civilization is not only misguided, but absurd,” Andrea Williams, chief executive of Christian Concern, a London-based nonprofit that has represented many Christians facing discrimination in the U.K., told the outlet.
“Singling out the Bible in this way is discriminatory and deeply ill-informed. To suggest that the crucifixion story involves ‘sexual violence’ is not just inaccurate, it’s a profound misreading of the text. The account of Jesus’ death is not a tale of trauma, it is the ultimate expression of love, sacrifice, and redemption, central to the Christian faith,” she added.
Mark Lambert, a Roman Catholic podcaster, denounced the trigger warning as a “hollow form of censorship masquaraded as sensitivity.”
“I think it’s typical of the culture that wants to sexualize our children and have drag queens and all this kind of stuff, and they want to censor the Bible,” he told GB News.
“They want to censor the book that built our civilization,” he continued. “It’s just so vacuous in academic terms that this is the way that they want to move forward.”
Classic literature, including works by historic English authors, has been raising concerns in the U.K. in recent years.
In 2023, the U.K. government made headlines when Prevent, the country’s anti-terrorism unit, flagged classic works of English literature as potential triggers for far-right extremism.
Among the authors listed were C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Edmund Burke and William Shakespeare.
Conservative author Douglas Murray, whose book The Strange Death of Europe was also flagged, told Fox News at the time that the list was “exceptionally self-immolating,” and warned that elites in the U.K. and throughout the Western world increasingly hate their own culture.
The number of Christians in the U.K. has been dwindling in recent generations, with the 2021 census finding that less than half of the country’s population identifies with Christianity for the first time since the first British census in 1801.
Data published in 2022 by the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics showed only 46.2% (or 27.5 million) of the country’s more than 67 million people say they are Christian. In 2011, when the last census was conducted, 59.3% of the population, or 33.3 million people, identified as Christian. More than 70% of Britons identified as Christian as recently as 2001.
Jon Brown is a reporter for The Christian Post. Send news tips to jon.brown@christianpost.com
